Google Analytics Stats and May Recipes

Well hello, June. Yep, it’s June first. Can you believe it? Today officially marks the first day of hurricane season. Florida hasn’t been hit by a strong hurricane since 2005, I believe. Hurricane Wilma hit South Florida that year. I lived in Central Florida in 2005 so I didn’t get much of an impact from that storm but the year before, in 2004, where I lived was hit by three hurricanes: Charley, Frances and Jeanne. It was a crazy year that year. Now I live near the coast. As much as I love stormy weather (I actually get excited when a storm is coming) I am not looking forward to having to put up hurricane shutters if a storm does approach us. But let’s move onto some other things! Today I will be sharing the recipes that I made in May, my Google Analyticsstats and a mini Google Analytics tutorial.

Now, let’s take a look at some stats. I am trying to get better at using Google Analytics (GA). It really is a useful tool for bloggers. If you aren’t familiar with GA, it’s a tool that tracks page visits, unique visits and page views to your blog. You can zero in on any time period – day, week, month, year and find out which posts are your most popular posts for any given time frame.

Here is a snapshot of my top five referral sites for the month of May. This is only for page views. I didn’t copy info for bounce rate or percentage of new visits.

What does this information mean? In the first chart, some of it is obvious but you may be asking yourself what “Direct/None” and “Google/Organic” means. I did a little research and found some answers.

Direct/None: this means that someone went directly to your site by either typing in the web address or visiting from a bookmark to your website. “None” means that the visits weren’t referrals from another website. (source)

Google/Organic: This means that traffic was sent to your website for free via Google search. Free means that you didn’t pay Google to feature your site in their search engine (the paid results are usually at the top or bottom of the Google search results, or on the side, and are usually highlighted and say something along the lines of sponsored page) and that visitors went to your page after searching for something on Google. Unfortunately, many of the keywords used to reach your site are not provided. You can find keywords by going to the “Traffic Sources” tab on the left side of GA and selecting “Overview.” Below are the top 10 keywords used in May that drove traffic to my site. (source)

Wondering what the info in the second chart means? Wonder no more!

Visits: this is the number of page visits to your site. You can get detailed information on how this number is calculated by visiting GA Help.

Unique Visitors: This is the number of unduplicated visitors to your site.

Page views: The number of pages viewed on your site. This number includes repeated visits to the same page.

Overall, I had an increase in visits, unique visitors and page views from April. This is great because of course, you want to keep increasing your numbers!

I hope this information has given you a little more insight on how to use Google Analytics. In the future, I will highlight more areas of Google Analytics as I become more familiar with them.

14 comments on “Google Analytics Stats and May Recipes”

Thanks so much for sharing these stats with us! It’s comforting to see that your bounce rate is over 80% as well. I have read so many times that it should be closer to 60%, but I think that would be very difficult with a food blog. I know when I’m looking at Pinterest or searching for a recipe, I almost always look at one page and move on, so it doesn’t surprise me that recipe sites have a higher bounce rate. (If I like the blog, I will probably click a social media button to follow it, but that doesn’t count as a page view.) Great job increasing your numbers this month! I’m sure you will continue to grow :)

Great post– this is good info for me. Every now and then I click on the google analytics page but never know if I should be pleased or disappointed. If I eventually try to monetize my blog I guess I will pay more attention but for now I am always so happy to see that others are reading what I’ve shared. I think your blog is wonderful and you are doing a great job!

I love seeing all the recipes rounded up like this! They all look amazing…but I’ve been finding myself actually day dreaming about the Blueberry Preserves since you’ve posted it!
I’m pinning. I appreciate you sharing the info about google stats…helps a lot!

Your recipes look so good! I can hardly believe that we are again in the hurricane season. Last year Hurricane Sandy did serious damage in my area of Jamaica. I hope this year you will not experience any storms or hurricanes and likewise in my country. Thanks for the information on Google Analytics. Have a great week.

Oh the hurricane season..I used to work for The Weather Channel, and things were quite crazy during this time of the year. I’ m praying that this year you won’t have to put up the shutters! You are a lot braver than I ever will be. All the dishes you made look scrumptious esp the veggie quiche!! Thank you for sharing some info about Google Analytics. I just started using it last week and it sounds like bunch of gibberish to me. 30,000+ visits! That’s awesome!